KickStarter Terra Invicta - sci-fi grand strategy from Long War mod creators - now available on Early Access

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Talking about country preference... game really needs more national orgs out of the US and the 1st world.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Suppose that 2/3 missions are successful

if you're not succesful 99% of the times you're doing it wrong. only critical failure has to slow you because that's unavoidable, every other mission must be perfectly set up. this way quick learner and striver are even more useful. also you can have only 6 agents. the other two spots are for your moles.
yeah, the game is doomed, despite being a very interesting and complex one, its devs can't into balance, can't so bad that, as you can see by how they modified missiles, they have NO idea what they're doing.

 

[Jaedar]

I've did a regular assault alien asset mission from space (had to bring 4 frigates with full marines in utility modules), then it turned out i have to land the councilor at that base and then the "i win" button became active. No need for bombardment.

The game won't let me land at the alien base with my ships (I think because it is not undefended since it has 10 battlestations). Is it the deorbit/transfer command to the councilor?

I have had 100% success on all my alien assault from space missions, but the main alien base is 0% so I assumed it was just hardcoded to be impossible.

Talking about country preference... game really needs more national orgs out of the US and the 1st world.

Realism though.

 

[Alpharius]

I've did a regular assault alien asset mission from space (had to bring 4 frigates with full marines in utility modules), then it turned out i have to land the councilor at that base and then the "i win" button became active. No need for bombardment.

The game won't let me land at the alien base with my ships (I think because it is not undefended since it has 10 battlestations). Is it the deorbit/transfer command to the councilor?

I have had 100% success on all my alien assault from space missions, but the main alien base is 0% so I assumed it was just hardcoded to be impossible.

I landed after all the defenses were destroyed by the assault space asset mission, used deorbit and landed an additional marine cruiser just in case but it wasn't nedded.

It had like 130-150 or something difficulty. Success chance calculations are shown when you do it with a councillor like the usual missions. Each elite marine utility module adds +5 to success i think.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

how do you assault habs? i have no problem with bases, but when it's habs i have no idea.

 

[Jaedar]

I landed after all the defenses were destroyed by the assault space asset mission, used deorbit and landed an additional marine cruiser just in case but it wasn't nedded.

Assault space asset mission? That was not available to me from orbit either. Unless you mean the one from marine modules, and not the councilor one.

It had like 130-150 or something difficulty. Success chance calculations are shown when you do it with a councillor like the usual missions. Each elite marine utility module adds +5 to success i think.

+5 is correct I think. Damn, that's a lot of modules to get a good success rate though.

how do you assault habs? i have no problem with bases, but when it's habs i have no idea.

By habs you mean orbitals? I think you need to dock with them first, which means you have to destroy all defences and orbiting fleets first.

 

[Alpharius]

how do you assault habs? i have no problem with bases, but when it's habs i have no idea.

Its possible to dock with them and assault only after the defenses are destroyed. Didn't try bringing a councillor but i don't think it would have changed anything.

I landed after all the defenses were destroyed by the assault space asset mission, used deorbit and landed an additional marine cruiser just in case but it wasn't nedded.

Assault space asset mission? That was not available to me from orbit either. Unless you mean the one from marine modules, and not the councilor one.

I think its called that, it was the first mission in the list looks kinda like a red gear. I used the one from councillor cause he adds command skill and +ops to success chance though maybe the one from the fleet would have worked too with additional ships.

 

[Jaedar]

It seems that for bombardments, mag weapons have values between 1-7 (Spinal Coiler Mk3 has 7), lasers are worse but green phaser is 6.4 so almost as good as mag. Missiles all have 0, but torps have 50-1000.

A ship with 4 nuclear torpedo bays is worth 2000. No idea what this number is compared against, but I'm kinda feeling like building a dozen of them and using them instead of building 30 marines.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i docked on plenty of defenseless habs, button still grayed out. that's why i'm asking.

I'm kinda feeling like building a dozen of them

all you need to raze a base is 1. just 1. easiest way to clean space from alien bases is to build a single fast ship armed with nukes and send it to a base. sometimes the gigantic alien fleet nearby will intercept and annihilate you, but it'd had done the same even if you brought all your firepower ever produced by your factories. nukes always have priority over land defenses, except when you crit fail. even when shit hits the fan, you just lost a single tiny ship instead of a full fleet.

 

[Jaedar]

i docked on plenty of defenseless habs, button still grayed out. that's why i'm asking.

Yeah, then I don't know. I noticed some habs in earth orbit being undockable for marine action, so might be a bug.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i realized why i'm taking so much shit from this shit game: it's the closest i can get to a modern millennium/deuteros. good old games.

 

[Jaedar]

As soon as I got to like 30% of total fleet power, the aliens started spamming ships left and right, after barely building anything. This is despite me having taken out all but their main base. So I looked a bit in the game files and save, and it turns out the aliens just cheat. They have effectively infinite resources (the aliens have 450k metals stored up, ie they've had at least 15k per year net income from less than 10 bases. Seems legit.). They also don't seem to pay upkeep on anything.

I took out the final alien base via bombardment: I had 120 nuclear torpedo launchers, which seems to have been massive overkill as I can't even find a ship without full ammo (and the laggy ui makes me not want to try very hard) and the whole base got annhilated instantly.

But I'm pretty tired of this game, and it's becoming increasingly clear it's going to take ingame years to mop up properly. Either by spending a year or two building a deathfleet, and then years zooming it around to kill shipyards, or more realistically building 4 more shipyard orbitals around mercury and spamming ships super hard for a year. And I already united all of earth except the middle east and some random tiny islands(can't get the caliphate to form so fuck it). I also finished all but one research, and finished all useful research long ago.

So I said fuck it and just edited the game data so the alien defense modules consume infinite power. Victory followed in less than a month as the aliens could no longer produce (and me using landed ships as bait to lure the aliens away from their stations to drop their power quicker).

In the end, only servants and protectorate of the ai factions discovered their win cons and as soon as I figured out to build defenses on all my earth orbitals and stopped being so scared of alien retaliation I crippled their efforts on earth beyond recovery. Meanwhile the aliens spent the last decade huddling around their stations as I just grabbed more and more bases and killed all theirs (which was pointless, but I didn't know).

I really wish this game didn't turn mediocre after the first decade, and then to such complete shit towards the end. It's very very hard to recommend right now, at least for most of the factions: potentially exodus and protectorate are not awful in the lategame.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Realism though.

First world can have best orgs, but contrary to what certain first worlders think, people outside the first world can actually have organizations that aren't criminal gangs

 

[Jaedar]

Realism though.

First world can have best orgs, but contrary to what certain first worlders think, people outside the first world can actually have organizations that aren't criminal gangs

I mean, there are various special ops orgs and so on from se-asia, south america, etc. But usually only one per country, whereas the US has like a dozen special ops orgs alone. And since there aren't so many, they don't appear often compared to first world orgs.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Realism though.

First world can have best orgs, but contrary to what certain first worlders think, people outside the first world can actually have organizations that aren't criminal gangs

I mean, there are various special ops orgs and so on from se-asia, south america, etc. But usually only one per country, whereas the US has like a dozen special ops orgs alone. And since there aren't so many, they don't appear often compared to first world orgs.

And that's the problem, needs more org diversity.
You can probably specialize them, with some countries getting better orgs of certain types and stats

 

[Demo.Graph]

it turns out the aliens just cheat

Other factions also cheat. I got random drops in faction reputation (or whatever it's called, pie chart on the nation dashboard) when I raised my total support over some limit.

 

[Jaedar]

I would like to recommend this game, but I can't really in its current state.

It starts great as you take command over an illuminati-type org trying to enforce its agenda on the world in the wake of an impending alien invasion. Cajoling nations to your cause, redirecting research and funds, wars, taking over NGOs, even assassinations and coups. And then slowly starting to step into space, building space stations and mines on the moon and beyond.

But then some very questionable balancing comes up: Your ability to control more of earth is mostly limited by your administration capacity and not by your shadowy manipulation skills. You suddenly have twice as much research as all the other factions combined. You have more space resources than you know what to do with, because spending them makes the aliens take steps against you personally. So you feel very artificially constrained on multiple fronts, while some gameplay elements become irrelevant.

And after that, you reach the slog that is the endgame: Nigh indestructible alien stations, year+ travel times to get anywhere and just needing to slowly grind out a victory against human factions that have been made utterly irrelevant, and aliens too afraid of your fleets to take offensive action, and too cheaty to be dealt with via attrition.

And some issues are just game long. The interface is poor, and so much of the information you need is hidden in different submenus or not filterable. It also lags something fierce, with just opening or closing the *reduced* tech tree freezing the game for seconds. Menus are also grouped seemingly at random, and with no consistent sorting/filter options/defaults. And some obscure mechanics as well, such as having your armies instantly go from modern to WW1 relics because you peacefully united two countries.

The combat also deserves special mention for being cool in theory (newtonian ships with somewhat realistic heat dissipation issues) but a complete nightmare to control. You can design your own ships, but there are dozens of nigh identical modules (do you want gas, molten, or a solid core fission reactor? Or maybe not even fission at all?) and lots of dubious numerical problems: your phaser point defence will claim to have twice the range of particle point defence, but in actual combat the opposite is true due to something something optics.

it turns out the aliens just cheat

Other factions also cheat. I got random drops in faction reputation (or whatever it's called, pie chart on the nation dashboard) when I raised my total support over some limit.

Are you sure that's not just councilors running missions against you? The AI often starts its takeover attempts by trying to raise public opinion, and will also do it defensively if you raise yours too high in their nations. I did feel the ai was cheating a few times, but I never managed to confirm it as there were always benign explanations. And if it actually cheated I'd expect it to be more effective.

And that's the problem, needs more org diversity.

It wouldn't hurt, but honestly it's not even top 10 issue. I stopped managing my orgs completely like a decade or so into the game, and I'm glad I didn't need to pay more attention to them, because the councilor micro was already too much.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Are you sure that's not just councilors running missions against you?

Yes. It was a year or two into the game. I saw almost simultaneous drops in several nations in which I've pumped up reputation to hoard influence (or how is it called? the money you spend on orgs and agents). They were my core Russia (I've completely controlled it, as well as most its neighbours so that nobody could get neighbourhood bonus) and a bunch of African and Asian colonies.
For colonies I've aimed at two kinds of nations. Obscure, but comparatively populous nations, like Nigeria or Philippines, because I was interested in influence from pops, not in cash or science. And one point African minors for cash.
Both of them aren't really interesting for other factions, because in my experience they tend to focus on large and/or productive nations (EU, India, Brazil, etc.). This way I've milked my colonies in peace, without getting distracted for capture-recapture circlejerk that went in more attractive regions.
No attempts to capture these countries followed the reputation drops. So while it might be some AI fluke, I believe that it was some kind of balancing script to stop player from getting too much income.

 

[Alpharius]

Are you sure that's not just councilors running missions against you?

Yes. It was a year or two into the game. I saw almost simultaneous drops in several nations in which I've pumped up reputation to hoard influence (or how is it called? the money you spend on orgs and agents). They were my core Russia (I've completely controlled it, as well as most its neighbours so that nobody could get neighbourhood bonus) and a bunch of African and Asian colonies.
For colonies I've aimed at two kinds of nations. Obscure, but comparatively populous nations, like Nigeria or Philippines, because I was interested in influence from pops, not in cash or science. And one point African minors for cash.
Both of them aren't really interesting for other factions, because in my experience they tend to focus on large and/or productive nations (EU, India, Brazil, etc.). This way I've milked my colonies in peace, without getting distracted for capture-recapture circlejerk that went in more attractive regions.
No attempts to capture these countries followed the reputation drops. So while it might be some AI fluke, I believe that it was some kind of balancing script to stop player from getting too much income.

Might have been a global event like scientist made a discovery or first space birth (had this one multiple times btw) or orbital cleanup or something which gives a public opinion boost around the world to a given faction. I've usualy had like 90% approval rating in the EU after i started investing in unity cause it seems that having a large number of regions decreases the base cohesion.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

what this game needs:

-clear numbers in sight. there's no way to understand how stuff like, for example, region conquest works. even thick-skull paradox learned this.

-removal of 75% of the engines and power cores. at least. they can be retooled into +x boni so that research isn't wasted
-removal of 50% of the weapons. especially in the beginning, they're not even going to be used once. they're thought for human vs human battles, but there's literally none to be had.
worth noting: i'm a 1.13 nut. i love roguetech. the more the merrier, i need tactical choices of any kind. these are not such, these are just useless clutter.
-removal of servants. either that or aliens must be nerfed 50-60% and moved to very late end game.
-removal of magic purge. first you jerk off how your lore is hard sci-fi, then this. nigga please. this is not asymmetric gameplay, it's just aggravating bullshit for the sake of annoying players with something they can't properly fight against.
-removal of any requisite to the "great nations", the smaller ones must be unlocked from start, the bigger ones should cost one tenth of what they do. they also should unlock "per region", non "per tag": i conquered ethiopia, but i can't unlock the african union without releasing it first. also claims should be transfered upstream: i own ethiopia, i'm eligible to own its claims too, that's how empires work. they don't want map painting? make unrest slower to fight off. not as slow as stuff like instruction or military, which basically only china, india and usa can reliably do.
-it'd make more sense if declaring war lowered unity, slowly lowered it further while at war, and lowered unrest after a conquest. at the moment, the game does the exact opposite: as long as you declare war against a new opponent, your people are gleefully happy and supportive, but as soon as you win they're pissed. the fuck? war having a heavy economic impact wouldn't hurt.
-agent selection *before* start. even 1 picked and 1 random would be better than this travesty of having to restart several times until you get a decent pick.

up to this point, it's a couple of afternoons long job, for a single person. a week if you do it while watching television and jerking off.


-reworking of bases bombing. i spend two thirds of my time past early game jumping from base to base to squint my eyes trying to figure what the fuck did magically explode this time. even a toggle "automatically rebuild destroyed structures" would improve the experience greatly, that's how depressing the situation is at the moment.

-at least two or three more space resources (i'd say "ten", but i do me and the interface couldn't hold them. even having the already present resources split in "low quality" and "high quality" would make me happy), to make planets more different and more valuable. more distant planets hardly offer anything more than what your average asteroid does. antimatter is a joke, but its heart is in the right place. having venus unlock at endgame with hard and pure metals would make sense.

-easier access to military units, more real warfare, more conquest. adding "air force" wouldn't hurt. even if implemented in a primitive, grotesque way as the navy is, as a simple bonus.

wishful thinking:
-truely diverse factions. a couple different researches and a unique victory condition don't cut it. even something marginal like "humanity first +10% military spending, illuminati +10% welfare" would be better than this. is it already like this? TELL ME! the game needs a proper faction selection screen, the game start settings are worth of an alpha right now.
-better control nodes. give me perks, "better (+1? +2? TELL ME!) purges on local nodes" is offensively useless. i'm not asking for eu4's mission trees for every nation (i actually could, it's not hard to code), but i'd be glad if nations were something more than "how much money this produces?". europe has an identity somehow, but by the time eu is decent you could have got the usual usa, india or china and be much stronger.
-military perks. treat them as "orgs for combat units". +x damage against region defenses, -x damage from alien units, simple stuff like this. your faction as a whole could be treated as the seventh agent, you could attach this stuff. all the non-stats orgs could be moved there. i want to feel my faction as *my* faction. it could have its own stats too, they could make losing an agent less hurtful, especially when it happens in late game, one gets captured/killed and suddenly you lose.
-political matters for nations. like simcity's edicts, unlocked by values like education or democracy and such, they'd help make them more diverse. at the moment, the only difference i feel is how much money they produce, if it's a lot, full economy, if it's not a lot, full spoil.


in total, it's a 4-6 weeks long job for a single, television watching, penis stroking, person. they have a full studio, and in the last month all they could do has been "here are the % of unlocking the next research" and "missiles are useless? here's a change to make them even more useless". also no way to make any critique on reddshit cesspool. it's either praise or fuck off.


expansion level features: logistics. you can't sell me "map painting is not realistic" while materials teleport around instantly. i want all my colonies every few months to spawn a transport ship and i want to design it. costs detracted from shipment. let me also design colony ships, probes/explorers and builders, so i don't have to have them beside my combat ships. this way moon, mars and mercury get a whole new value.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

another systemic crash, and this time rewinding the game by three months didn't help. i think i'm done.

 

[thesecret1]

Yes. It was a year or two into the game. I saw almost simultaneous drops in several nations in which I've pumped up reputation to hoard influence (or how is it called? the money you spend on orgs and agents). They were my core Russia (I've completely controlled it, as well as most its neighbours so that nobody could get neighbourhood bonus) and a bunch of African and Asian colonies.
For colonies I've aimed at two kinds of nations. Obscure, but comparatively populous nations, like Nigeria or Philippines, because I was interested in influence from pops, not in cash or science. And one point African minors for cash.
Both of them aren't really interesting for other factions, because in my experience they tend to focus on large and/or productive nations (EU, India, Brazil, etc.). This way I've milked my colonies in peace, without getting distracted for capture-recapture circlejerk that went in more attractive regions.
No attempts to capture these countries followed the reputation drops. So while it might be some AI fluke, I believe that it was some kind of balancing script to stop player from getting too much income.

Nah, it was the other factions. I know because I managed to completely eliminate all the other councillors in the game (temporarily, at least), and my countries sat happily at over 95% for me (some even 100%). The big support drop is because the more supporters you have in a country, the easier they are to sway by someone else. So if you control 80% and want to get to 90%, it can take 5 public campaigns easily. But if someone runs a campaign against you while you're at 90%, he'll get you down to 75% no problem. The AI is a cunt and often does this not because it has a solid plan to take over, but just because it can piss on your parade, especially if your relations with them are bad

 

[thesecret1]

what this game needs

You forgot the most important part, which is some sort of a solution for the absolutely insufferable councillor micro after you've long since left the other faction in the dust. You can wreck them any time of the day, but you cannot ignore them, because if you do, they'll start stealing your control points

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i forgot a lot of stuff, like nations growing too big to be influenced anymore, but this in turn solves your problem: if you can melt two meganations together they're already too big for enemy agents to do anything to them. hell, starting vanilla china already is. but aliens still can, and at some point you could find they burned a hole through your contry and you have literally 0% chance to change the situation. that's why servants and/or magic mind control must go away.

 

[thesecret1]

if you can melt two meganations together they're already too big for enemy agents to do anything to them.

Australia cannot be melted, and is never big enough to have this effect.